Faith, Neurosis, and Writer's Block

Writer's Block Tries Our Patience and Our Faith

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

What strikes me most about how people talk about writer’s block is how testy writers can be about it. “Writer’s block is a load of nonsense,” says Alexander Mcall Smith, the prolific author of the “Ladies Detective Agency” novels. “It’s more likely a symptom of depression or maybe [writers] have nothing to say.” When asked, Toni Morrison emphatically “disavows the term.” The novelist Rumaan Alam believes “writer’s block is a fiction. You can always write garbage.”  

Sadly, Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer who suffered from 32 years of silence after publishing acclaimed nonfiction for the magazine, might have had the most to say about writer’s block, but he never said a word about his experience with it, though he once told an editor that he had “a deadline of my own—an inner deadline.” Despite his long silence, Mitchell just kept going to his tiny office at the New Yorker, where his colleagues often heard typing through a closed door. He never said what he was working on, though he once shared a paper bag full of drafts, mostly memoir, with a friend, who planned to publish a couple articles from it.  Mitchell’s “inner deadline” extended to his death in 1996.  

I don’t know many writers who haven’t had bouts of writer’s block, though it is often procrastination, the less severe form.  Donald Murray called it the “law of delay”: “Writing which can be delayed will be.” Sometimes, Murray argued, this delay is important, creating space for writers to think or gain a useful distance from the work to see it anew. The least useful delay is waiting for inspiration, which works from the premise that writing is beyond the writer’s control.

Though some creative writers may be dismissive of writer’s block there is abundant research that it is real. This scholarship draws from many disciplines—composition studies, cognitive science, and psychology—and the most intriguing to me was work published in 1950 by a psychoanalyst, E. Bergler, who argued in The Writer and Psychoanalysis that writer’s block is a mental health problem. “In twenty years of psychoanalytic practice,” he writes, “the most depressed, pitiful lot has been that of writers.”  The struggle to get words on the page, and the misery it caused writers, was no surprise because writers are neurotic and antisocial: “Normal people don’t feel impelled to write.” I got Bergler’s book through interlibray loan but was quickly lost in the Freudian analysis.

Among other things, Bergler’s is an extraordinarily narrow view on what constitutes a writer, but it did make me think about how high the stakes can feel when writers go silent. I published some research with my friend Kelly a few years back on how advanced college writers—all English majors—often find themselves suffering from imposter syndrome when faced with revising their work. “I’m supposed to be good at this,” they would say, “but clearly I’m not.” This often made them miserable, though they all eventually got the work done. If we identify as a writer perhaps the worst thing that can happen is not being able to write.

The causes of writer’s block are well established—demanding internal critics, fear of failure, perfectionism, bad experiences with teachers—and the cures include things like automatic writing, breaking writing into manageable tasks, and seeking support from others.

The influential work of composition scholar Mike Rose also points to two things that often block writers: reliance on rigid rules about writing and overcommitment to plans that aren’t helpful. He observes that when they sit down to write, writers give “instructions to the self” about how to proceed.  I think about myself as a young writer and those instructions included the conviction that I had to nail the beginning of the work before I could proceed, and every sentence had to sound good before writing the next one. This was a recipe for a long vigil before a blank page.

The worst of these moments came when I was in grad school, and feeling naively confident about my writing skills, I leased an IBM Selectric typewriter—a big beast of a machine—and parked it on my desk. I got the machine to write not only seminar papers but short stories.  The IBM always seemed eager for fresh paper, and once loaded, it would wait for me to type something on it. Electric typewriters hum expectantly, and a Selectric had a particularly loud, impatient hum, and it filled the silence with tension that shut me down completely. I couldn’t write a thing without multiple false starts.

I gave up electric typewriters for this reason, and then went, like everyone else, to computers, though now also I do some of my work on old, manual Olympias, which are completely silent and uncomplaining until the words come.

Then they are noisy with the work, which is strangely satisfying. This anecdote provides some insight into writer’s block, and the ways that writers can obsess over the tools—the right paper, the right pen, the right time of day. This is inevitable, and part of the apprenticeship in writing is figuring this stuff out.

My own solution to writer’s block is to write badly. I wrote about this in an essay for the Christian Science Monitor many years ago, describing how difficult it is to witness my students’ agony getting words to the page. The principle is simple: you are far better off having something to work with, even if it’s not very good, then waiting in anguish for the “right” words to come. Of course, the ability to tolerate one’s bad writing is key. No one wants to produce ugly prose—especially writers—and the dissonance this creates among people who love beautiful language can seem unbearable.

What this requires is a faith that bad writing can generate good writing and that the writer has the talent to make it so. That’s the rub, of course. Many of us simply don’t believe in our talent, especially since it seems there is ample evidence that we don’t have it. How else are we to interpret the endless rejections, and the sense—often wrong—that most other writers are more successful than us? I’ve thought about where this faith comes from. Obviously, success helps. But before that, before many (or any) of our essays, poems, stories find a publisher, we need to draw on that faith to keep going, especially when the going is rough.

 There was a moment in my own writing life when two important things happened:  I shed the naïve faith I had in my work when I was young and then moved beyond the despair that arose when I finally grasped how groundless this early faith was. It was a kind of molt, something like the twelve-year cicadas of my midwestern youth, when a vulnerable writer-self emerged from the husk of that former self. In a way, this allowed me to start over again as a writer, working from the understanding that meaning-making is fundamentally an act of revision not inspiration. Because writing is about discovering what I didn’t know I knew, whatever ends up being published ( if anything)  is the residue of a longer process, one that involves circling around the material, trying this and then that while I try to understand what I want to say. When I do this, my instructions to self are simple: be patient.

Writer’s block tries our patience. Even worse, it tries our faith. We might be ashamed by false starts, blank pages, and long silences. But seeing writing as rewriting lowers the stakes. A false start in merely trying something out. A blank page is room to roam. Silence is a quiet place to sit, without panic, as we listen for the words to come, and they always will if we are patient enough.